Alfred, Andreas, and Stefan share their thoughts

Facebook, Google, Twitter, and all those other services that sell ads want to know as much about you as they can possibly find out. Consider for example Facebook’s Like button that is part of most web pages: even if you don’t click it, Facebook knows that you have viewed that page. How can they know? Since you have logged in to Facebook before, they have stored a cookie in your browser. And the Like button’s image is loaded from Facebook’s servers, so that cookie is sent to Facebook, together with information about the page that you’ve just visited. (My blog does not contain any tracking codes, not even Google analytics.)

So how can you avoid this? You could delete all stored cookies every single time you log out of Facebook (and Twitter and Google and…) but that’s not really convenient. Fluid is a small browser for Mac OS X (based on the same WebKit engine as Safari), but with a twist: instead of using the application to browse the Internet, you create specialized browsers for specific websites. I’ve set up a number of them: one each for my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts plus a couple more for accounts that I help maintain for my historic railway club.

Since these specialized browsers all store their cookies seperately from each other, I can use my main browser without ever having a Facebook or Twitter login. For those services, I appear as some random surfer, not connected to my actual profile.

Of course, this little trick is not perfect. WIth advanced analytics that all the ad networks employ, some information is still gathered about me (such as when I click a link in my Facebook browser that takes me to a different website), but I still feel a lot better about not giving away all my browsing history all the time.

So I’ve plunked down 100 bucks for an early bird developer account at join.app.net, a new social network. So why would anyone pay for something like this, if Facebook and Twitter and everything else is free? Because it isn’t.

Facebook and Twitter live off selling their users to advertisers. Nothing wrong with that, but it means that more and more, they choose to implement features and control the user experience to maximize value for the advertisers. What the users want and how they would like to be treated becomes less important. And third-party applications and their developers make things complicated, since they do not help generating ad revenue, so more and more, they’re shut out or severely restricted.

Dalton Caldwell was annoyed by that, decided to do something about it: create a new social media platform, but instead of financing it through advertising, have the users pay for it. At least in principle, it aligns the interests of the platform company with that of the users, since happy users will generate more revenue. Right now, it’s an experiment (but it’s looking like it might get very successful, with over 12.000 paying users signing up in less than two months). Right now I have the bragging rights to be the first among my friends to have signed up, but that mainly means that none of my friends are on app.net yet. We’ll see if that changes within the next 12 months.

Which brings me to the second service: if-this-then-that, or IFTTT for short. I now have a plethora of social media accounts, and distributing the various thoughts that I sometimes find worth publishing can become tedious. IFTTT helps with that: it monitors your account on any of 30 or so services (you decided with ones), and then cross-posts new posts from one service to any other one of your choosing. You decide which service to monitor and what to post where by settings up simple recipes: if I publish a new blog post, take it’s title and URL and post it to app.net, Facebook and Twitter. I’ve just started using it, but from what I can see from my friends using it, it looks like a very useful tool.

I like using VMware Fusion on my Mac, but it has one shortcoming: it cannot boot from USB devices. You can use disk images (floppy, CD/DVD and harddisk) as well as a physical optical drive, but USB devices are not available. That’s unfortunate if you want to use VMware to prepare a hard disk for a machine, and want to test booting off that system before installing it in the machine.

When I install a new FreeBSD machine, I often start out from an existing FreeBSD machine and install directly from that running system, instead of booting off an install DVD. Obviously, using a virtual machine for this bootstrapping system, together with a USB hard disk adapter, is very convenient. But without being able to boot the VM off that USB disk, testing can be cumbersome.

I was very happy to come across Plop, a boot manager with many features. The most interesting one for me is it’s support for booting off USB devices without BIOS support. Plop includes its own U/O/EHCI driver, supporting standard USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices and ports.

Also very important: Plop can be run off a CD or floppy image, so you don’t need to (re-)configure your main hard disk. If I feel adventurous, I might look into patching the Plop BIOS extension into VMware, making booting even easier. For the time being, I’m using the floppy image, since none of my virtual (nor physical) machines have floppy drives any more.

Also, when you have an older machine which BIOS does not support booting off USB devices, Plop might be very helpful!

In FreeBSD, sshd by default gets started quite late in the boot process, about the same time a console will show the login prompt. There’s quite a few services that can make trouble and hang before that. Annoyingly, you can’t fix a stuck system via ssh, since it’s not started yet. But as it turns out, sshd can be started quite a bit earlier than FreeBSD does by default.

Note that starting sshd before certain parts of the system are ready might give you temporary or permanent errors. For example, starting sshd before the user home directories are mounted might cause problems with logins. However, if your machine has all critical filesystems on local disks, making these changes should not pose any problems, and will allow you to log in while the rc scripts are still running, giving you the opportunity to fix any misbehaving services.

I like bash, mostly for its interactive features over FreeBSD’s standard Bourne-compatible shell, ash.

Setting bash as the default shell for the root user however has a big downside: if you ever break bash or any of the libraries it depends on, you can’t log in as root anymore to fix it. I’ve tried quite a few ways to work around this, and I think I’ve finally figured out a good solution: leave the root shell as /bin/sh, and add this snippet at the end of /root/.profile:

For the longest time, I couldn’t get CUPS configured on my FreeBSD server successfully. Between CUPS access rules, foomatic drivers and avahi announcements, I had terrible trouble making heads or tails of the nondescript error messages I was getting.

Spurned on by the arrival of an iPad, I finally sat down and worked through configuring CUPS and avahi. So I don’t have to go through all the fiddling again, here’s a recipe of what I did.

For a recent two-week vacation in France, I wanted to get the netbook and the iPhones (SIM-locked) online, without having to hunt down hotel wifi or other hotspots. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite as simple as in Germany, where there’s many reasonable priced options. Here’s what I managed to find out.

Orange offers a prepaid data plan (“journée Internet max”) for 3 Euros a day, but by various accounts, it is limited to web access only (no email etc.), and might even have restrictions on the sites you can browse to. I didn’t try that. Orange also offers an iPad option.

SFR offers a special “iPhone 3G” tariff that seemed quite interesting at first: full web access as well as email, in multiple packages up to 20 euros for 20 days and 500MB. They specifically claim that it only can be used with an iPhone. To get it, you buy a pre-paid SIM card (SFR La Carte) from any of the SFR stores, and one of the iPhone 3G recharges (see the bottom of that page). The recharge is a long number that you can punch in at a voice prompt after dialling 952. I had a French speaker help me with that. At least in Paris, most of the SFR store people I’ve encountered speak passable or very good English, and they were all friendly and helpful, and did help with the activation. You then configure your device to use APN “wapsfr”, and off you go.

With the iPhone package, data connections are indeed limited, but a lot more that I originally thought: surfing was limited to the SFR mobile portal (m.sfr.fr). Whether this was due to the fact that I was using a Mifi to establish the data connection, or due to some real limitation on the part of SFR, I’m not sure, but I’ve read elsewhere that others have encountered this block as well.

Even when accessing the mobile portal, you must use Safari on your iPhone, or make your other browser appear as an iPhone. For Safari, enable the Developer menu, and change the User Agent to one of the Mobile Safari entries. I believe there’s a number of Firefox Add-ons that allow you to change the User Agent.

The good news is that email access via IMAP and SMTP worked just fine, with all our accounts configured.

To get full internet access, I used OpenVPN from the netbook to connect to my server running on one of the ports usually used for email. This way, I could move all the internet traffic through the VPN, and have full internet access from the laptop.

Finally, to be able to browse from the iPhones as well, I used tinyproxy on the netbook to enable the iPhones to use the netbook as a proxy that connects through the VPN. This gave us full internet access throughout our journey.

Getting things purchased and activated was a bit of an adventure, but was fairly straightforward in the end. I was positively surprised by the coverage (minimum EDGE, mostly HSPA), even though we went to some slightly remote places (small villages on the Loire, Mont Saint Michel). All the descriptions claimed that services were limited to “France métropolitaine”. Also, I was surprised that we seemingly didn’t exceed the 500MB limit, even though the traffic counter on the Mifi claimed we had.

I can recommend this only to people very familiar with networking technology and the willingness to spend a couple of hours in the hotel room fiddling, instead of on the streets of Paris. So plan to bring your favorite geek along for the ride 🙂

The oldest, still running science fiction TV series, Doctor Who, has the Doctor jumping through time and space. A lot.

Now David McCandless has collected all of them in a huge dataset on his blog, waiting for someone to visualize them. As David writes in the Guardian,

I really wanted to do a mega-visualisation of all of the Time Lord’s journeys. But faced the cosmic task of trawling through well over 200 episodes, logging every time TARDIS was hurled through time and space.